Gershon Hundert, Leanor Segal Professor of Jewish Studies at McGill University, will deliver this year’s Lorry I. Lokey Lecture. Hundert served as editor-in-chief of the “YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe,” published in 2008 by Yale University Press in conjunction with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The two-volume work -- made up of original articles and essays on religion, folklore, politics, art, music, theater, language and literature -- presents the history and culture of Eastern European Jews over their centuries of settlement in the region.

Now available in a full-text online version enhanced by photographs, sound recordings, film clips, maps, and tables, the encyclopedia’s articles were written by scholars who are experts in their respective fields. “L.A. Times” critic Kenneth Turan called the work “a fiendishly comprehensive look at a civilization so unexpectedly multifaceted that it's best viewed as a Yiddish-speaking Atlantis, a lost world buried forever by the volcano of Nazi mass murder.”

Since 2009, the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at Portland State University has hosted an annual Lorry I. Lokey lecture in Jewish history. The lecture series is named in honor of Mr. Lokey, a Bay Area philanthropist whose support has helped grow and shape PSU’s Judaic Studies program.

Hundert also will give a talk in Hebrew on his latest research in Polish Jewish history at Machon Ivrit's Hebrew-language conversation group, Cafe V'Ivrit, on April 23, at Congregation Neveh Shalom.

For more information about Prof. Hundert’s lecture at PSU, please contact Jenn Director Knudsen, Judaic Studies’ development director, at (503) 725-2305, or email to jenn.d.knudsen@pdx.edu.